


Now And Then

by Filigree



Category: Eroica Yori Ai o Komete | From Eroica with Love
Genre: Deathfic, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-11-08
Updated: 2010-11-08
Packaged: 2017-10-13 03:33:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,289
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/132377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Filigree/pseuds/Filigree





	Now And Then

Prologue

Klaus saw the ball first, arcing up like a black-and-white meteor from the scuffle of players. Somebody in that mess was really clever, he thought sourly. Too bad it wasn't one of his team! Ah, well, that was what 'team captain' was all about -- marshalling his lads, and stepping in when they couldn't achieve what he wanted.

He intercepted the ball when it came down, swiped it from the side with a kick that deftly sent it back where it was supposed to go: howling right down the unguarded middle to North Academy's goal.

"Fuck you, Eberbach!" one of the Academy's finest called, laughing, as he raced by the still-tangled teams. Klaus grinned back at him, sparing no more than a moment to appreciate long legs and steel-grey eyes under a shock of muddy brown hair.

Ja, that was Steinmann, the Academy kicker. The golden boy. He would be, with those legs.

Shit! One moment was all they'd needed, another of Steinmann's cronies darting in to stop the ball. It shot away again, and Klaus knew his own boys couldn't reach it in time. He shoved away daydreams about World Cup finals, and the petulant feeling that Frankfurt's North Academy always ranged pretty Jan Steinmann against him _on purpose_, because he couldn't help looking --

Almost, almost. He dodged the ever-obliging Jan, who seemed determined to trip him one way or another. Klaus dove, hitting the ball with his shoulder this time. A clumsy move, but at least that delivered the game back to one of his team-mates. He hit the mud and grass, rolled upright with fluid grace -- and collided with Jan's foot, which had been a second away from stealing the ball.

Klaus had time to register a lurching sensation, less pain than a feeling of being hurled sideways at immense velocity.

Then he had a very strange dream.   
#

Part One

To His Lordship Dorian, Earl of Gloria --

#

The summons had arrived on a CD, thirty impersonal seconds of voice recording on storage material that could shelter a symphony. But then, thought Dorian as he followed Klaus' butler down a night-dimmed hallway, it wasn't as if Eberbach would be writing a note anytime soon.

#

I request the honour of your presence, briefly, at Schloss Eberbach, at any convenient date after the fifth of June and before the twentieth of August.

#

The butler showed Dorian in, then closed the door behind him. A single candle burned in a dreadfully baroque pewter wall-sconce. Except for the flame-lit area in which Dorian stood, the rest of the study was dark. From the blackest corner, inside the shadow of a huge bookcase, extruded a metallic glittering curve quite at odds with the ancient wood-and-leather warmth of the study.   
Oh, yes, Dorian realized: the wheelchair.

#

I am informed that you have consented to accept medical power-of-attorney for me, that you are aware of the extent of my injuries, and of my unavoidable retirement from the service of NATO.

#

Dorian had expected the darkness, after reading the medical reports. The one time he'd managed to sneak into the NATO hospital, he'd seen only a presumably-human figure contorted in frameworks of steel and plastic, wrapped like a mummy in white medical gauze over artificial skin. That had been months ago. Dorian told himself it was courtesy that had kept him away, after that, until Klaus himself felt well enough for company.

#

We have unfinished business, you and I.  
Respectfully,  
Klaus Heinz von dem Eberbach

#

"Lord Gloria, I thank you for your promptness," said the baritone voice from the shadows. If that rumble was weaker than it had been, or slightly slurred, or its English a shade too carefully precise -- Dorian didn't want to notice.

"You're welcome, Klaus," he started forward, trying for his best lighthearted smile.

"Stop. Stay in the light. Where I can see you."

Dorian paused.

"So beautiful," said the whisper in the dark. "I needed to see that again. So I could remember it better."

Dorian, stunned, could only wait. The last time he'd heard anything like this, it had been a gasping, sobbing admission. Parts of it groaned out in German, or smothered in starving kisses. At the time, Klaus' capitulation had been paradise.

"Klaus," he began.

"Strip," the whisper commanded. "Let me see all of you, Dorian."

Once, Dorian might have fainted with pleasure at the mere thought of that command, from Klaus. Now he hid a shudder of unease and slithered out of his suit without a performance. He stood silently, not even posed, for over a minute.

"Gut," said Klaus. "You're better like this. No flirting, no preening. Do you know why I always yelled at you for that, Dorian?"

"You were a closet case?"

"Your actions mocked me. They made me doubt what I'd thought you really were. Good. Loyal. Loving. I couldn't stand to be wrong about you. That made the rest of it unbearable."

"The rest of what?" Dorian felt completely at sea now, almost afraid of this lucid, exhausted, philosophical stranger.

"NATO. My career. Everything." A shaky laugh from the shadows. "Took me too long to see underneath that clown-mask of yours, Dorian. Too long. But I was right. You were worth it. Blow out the candle."

Dorian obeyed, grateful for the darkness that concealed his own gooseflesh-pimpled skin. "Why did you need to see me before the twentieth of August?" he asked casually, folding his clothing over the back of a heavy chair he'd noted earlier.

"On that date, I am leaving Schloss Eberbach and the family business concerns to the care of a distant cousin."

Dorian whipped around to face the corner. "You aren't considering --"

Dorian had considered it, to his wretched shame. The doctors as well, hinting at euthanasia while Klaus was still cogent enough to decide his own fate. But raving or steady, Klaus had resisted any such proposals. Even now --

"Suicide? Nein. That is one sin I will not commit, Dorian. The doctors worked hard enough to save me, even if it was only so I could be debriefed from the mission. There is a place in Switzerland, for NATO's heroic invalids. It is quiet, discreet. The staff are efficient, but not underfoot."

"I will not see you warehoused in a nursing home!" Dorian was outraged. "Come back to England with me -- you can stay at North Downs as long as you like. Until things -- get better."

"Things will not get better, Dorian," said the soft, slurred voice. "I would die of shame before I imposed more of my fate upon you than I must. I asked you here because -- you need to know -- you should not feel guilty. You did not do this to me."

"I did! I seduced you before your last mission, I distracted you, and then I wasn't there to protect you!"

"You would have died from the bomb blast. Like everyone else. I am glad that you were not there."

"How can you be so calm?"

"What else can I be? Angry? Sad? Guilty? None of it matters, now. Men in my line of work are lucky, sometimes, if they die in the line of duty. This was always a possibility." Eberbach's voice faltered in the darkness. "There were poisons, in the fire. The doctors told you their effects?"

"Yes." Oh, yes. Long words that he hadn't wanted to understand, until his stubborn rage made the specialists speak with more bluntness than they liked. 'Brain damage,' they'd said, and 'progressively worse with time,' and 'not a good candidate for trial therapies.'

No -- medical trials were best for younger patients. The less-damaged. The less socially-disposable, the ones with families and friends in high places. Having used the Iron Major one last time, NATO was prepared now to set him aside and let him slowly rust away.

It was that tacit verdict, really, that had made Dorian scarce in those first months, when Klaus was rarely lucid, and no one knew how much of the man's mind was still left. In a staggering triumph of military conditioning, the intelligence officers had been able to debrief him -- as if all his energy had been focused on relaying the information that had nearly killed him.

"I used to be able to remember their names," Klaus whispered. "The Alphabets who died. Their real names --"

"Oh, Klaus --"

"Dorian. You're crying. I can hear it. Stop."

"Can't."

"Then get your clothes and get out, until you can. Your tears -- hurt me."

"Well, all of this hurts me! It's so goddamned unfair. You were two years from retirement. I had such plans for us, darling. Why did they have to send you on that mission, anyway? It called for a younger man."

"Nine younger men died. Are you angry that I live, crippled? Would you have been happier, mourning a dead hero?"

"You call this 'living'?" Dorian's voice cracked unbecomingly, and he didn't care.

The old beloved snort of derision answered him from the unseen wheelchair. "With the proper drugs, it can be -- restful. I am long due a vacation, I think."

Anger had dried Dorian's tears, and now Klaus' words silenced the Earl's fury. "They drug you. For the pain?"

"Ja. Good drugs. But I miss the morphine. They weaned me away from it, after six months. Said I was addicted. Ha. I liked it. The dreams were almost as sweet as you."

Dorian couldn't help moving forward after that. Even his nightsight was defeated by the shadows and thick curtains, so he let his hands drift out to touch where he thought Klaus' face should be.

Klaus flinched back. "Nein! Do not."

"You won't let me see you. So, how else am I to find where to kiss you?"

That quip bought him a choked-back laugh, and Klaus suffered Dorian's light fingers to roam over his face and head.

_My poor love,_ Dorian thought, but let no tremble creep into his touch. It was marginally better this way,   
in the dark.

All the beautiful hair gone, shaved off where the skin hadn't been burnt. Strange ripples and folds of flesh mapped themselves under his fingers, where there should have been a smooth, elegant skull. He wandered by degrees down the sides of Klaus' head. The left ear snagged his touch; nothing impeded progress on the right side.

Dorian became suddenly very objective, or very numb.

It was much the same everywhere his hands glided. Features melted, molded back to a semblance of humanity by the burn masks and surgery. Nothing could have saved the Major's right arm -- that was gone, only a corrugated weal leading off the shoulder, easily felt under the thin robe. At times, Dorian felt an awkward answering touch, bumping into his arms or his face. He kissed that appendage finally, and did not think of the long strong fingers that should have brushed across his lips. Eventually, back up on the left side of the face, Dorian encountered a silky fluttering of eyelashes. A smooth eyelid. An inch-wide, nearly smooth patch of cheek, wet with tears, that led down to one untouched corner of the mouth. Dorian bent then, following his fingers, and kissed that corner. Softly, softly. Even this might hurt Klaus, although the other man had barely breathed during Dorian's reconnaissance.

"What was that for?" Klaus whispered, when Dorian had finished.

"Because I love you."

"You loved a body and a face."

"For about six months, darling. After that, your body was window dressing. After years of chasing you, I loved _you_. The whole insane, paranoid package. Body, mind, and soul."

"Idiot." Klaus said it with a wistful tone Dorian had never heard from him before. "So. You know what has happened. I am alive. You are not to blame. I want you to go, now. Don't come back."

"I just got here," Dorian purred, kneeling beside the chair.

"This is stupid. You are blinded by pity. You are a lover of beauty and perfection," Klaus said patiently. "Not spoiled goods. I can't even -- you know I am paralyzed from the waist down? There's no use. I can't feel --"

In a long moment, Dorian wanted to scream, or run away again. Not just because of the physical damage done to his love, but the man's mental state. Dorian had made enough excuses not to see Klaus before now. Had his selfishness added to the problem? Klaus was shutting down, shutting out anyone who might give him comfort: relatives, the surviving Alphabets, and now Dorian.

"Just because you can't feel it, doesn't mean you aren't capable," Dorian murmured against Klaus' mouth. His hands sought downward again, along the soft robe. They burrowed under the lightweight blanket over Klaus' hips. Paused for less than a heartbeat, encountering the indignity of a -- a diaper, for God's sake. At least the nurses were on the job and careful of their charge. Klaus was as fanatically clean as ever. Dorian slid his fingers down inside the front of that awful garment, touching, feeling, exulting when he discovered an unharmed and very familiar penis. It lay shrunken and trusting in his loose grasp, then twitched slightly.

"Somebody's awake," he said, pushing away the bulky padding from Klaus' groin.

"Your perversions are worse than I thought," said Klaus, without rancour. "Have you no shame at all?"

"None, where you're concerned. You so need this, my love. Hush. There, yes, that's got it." He rubbed and fondled the growing shaft, the slick head, the resilient testicles, and the soft skin in the cleft between Klaus' legs. "Parts of you work quite well. Can you feel anything?"

"I feel -- dizzy. Only because I am breathing faster."

"And you're breathing faster because you're aroused."

"You could be lying to me."

Dorian carefully grabbed Klaus' battered left arm, brought the stub down. Rubbed the forearm -- not the tip!   
\-- along the insistent and quite genuine erection.

"Dear God," Klaus said faintly, and said nothing more as Dorian bent to kiss it. Dorian did not waste time on teasing or displays of virtuosity. He wanted Klaus' bloodstream bubbling with as many lovely endorphins as possible, as soon as possible. Inside two minutes, the shaft jumped and filled his mouth with fluids. Dorian tasted salt and musk, and the bitterness of residual drugs.

He swallowed.

"Well?" Dorian asked, knowing better than to kiss Klaus for a while. Even at his most amenable, the darling maniac was touchy about the taste of his own seed, or Dorian's. "Do you feel better?"

Silence, for a long time. "I feel better. More relaxed." A yawn. "Sorry."

Dorian laughed in the darkness, setting his lover's minimal clothing to rights. "Don't be. I want you relaxed, and sleepy, and gratified. It's better than drugs, no?"

"Yes," said the other, and yawned again. Dorian left Klaus long enough to find his own clothes, and shrug back into them. "Shall I call your nurses?"

"Yes."

"Shall I spend the night?"

A pause. "Yes."

"Are you still going into that sanitarium?"

A longer pause. "Yes. It is for the best. You may love me still, but you cannot care for me."

"Dammit, Klaus --"

"-- But you may visit me. And send me roses, now and then, when you can't?"

Dorian kissed the ruined mouth again, gently. "I'll send you roses every week, and visit nearly as often. Will that be good?"

There was no answer. Dorian groped for the pulse-point on Klaus' neck. The heartbeat thrummed back at him, strong and steady. Klaus was asleep, for the moment safely beyond pain and humiliation.

That would have to be enough.

 

Part Two

"Good morning, Inga," Dorian greeted the on-duty nurse in English, as he swept into the clinic's lobby. "How is he today?"

"About the same, Lord Gloria," she said, her smile sad and a little proud. Over the last six years, Dorian had heard the whispers between the sanitarium staff: that if all their patients had such devoted visitors, the recovery rate would be miraculous. "He always seems to remember what day the roses arrive," Inga continued, "and he gets a little restless the next few days, after. Until you get here."

"Has he said anything, this week?"

A head-shake, and a sadder smile. "No, Lord Gloria. No sounds at all. If we move him away from the window before he's ready, he'll rock back and forth, a bit. The same, when he wants more painkillers. Mostly he sleeps or looks out the window, quiet as a lamb. He's there, right now."

#  
The little room was spartan as a priest's cell, dominated by the comfortable adjusting bed. A rolling cart bulky with monitoring equipment and an IV stand waited by the bed. One plastic vase of fragrant crimson roses graced a small table in front of the single window; another vase hung in a holder mounted to the wall over the bed. The smell of roses battled back the scents of disinfectant and soap.   
Though the room itself was shadowy from the pine tree just outside, the window looked out on a long vista of rolling fields and forests, rising toward the mountains. The colours changed with the season, a varied tapestry of white, gentle green, fallow gold. Just now, the hills blazed red-orange from autumn leaves.

A room with a more-conventional view would have been closer to the nurses' station, the easier to safeguard a failing man's health. But Dorian couldn't bear to move Klaus away from that window, and its glimpses of freedom. That was more important than giving the man an extra few months of stubborn life. The medical equipment was here only to ensure Klaus' comfort. Dorian had long ago signed a 'no heroic measures' clause.

"I'm here at last," Dorian said in his best German, as he shut the door behind him. "Did you miss me? I see the roses got here safely."

He made certain the roses always arrived on time. Once, in the early days, they hadn't. Neither Dorian nor  
the staff wanted a repeat of that episode.

Now the figure in the wheelchair didn't move. Dorian hadn't expected it to. The doctors were fairly certain that Klaus wasn't deaf -- he simply didn't respond to human voices, anymore. That didn't stop Dorian from pulling up a chair beside his love, and launching into a cheerful quiet patter of nonsense about the week past. He curled a hand over Klaus' forearm, letting touch alert the man to his presence.

As had become the norm for the last two years, the ruined head turned, the single green eye looked at Dorian with no trace of recognition. Even before Klaus had lost the ability or inclination to speak, he seemed to have lost most of his memories. The silence was more restful than his earlier questions, plaintive as a child's: "Why can't I walk? Where am I? Who are you?" And worst of all: "Who am I?"  
Klaus still associated Dorian with the roses, though, and that kept him from thrashing away the touch.

The head turned back toward the window, the body relaxing under its robe and blankets.

"You have to be a goddamned martyr," Dorian whispered to the uncaring amnesiac beside him. "To go this way, a slow sacrifice, when I told you every day that I'd do whatever you wanted -- " He bit back a sniffle. Now it didn't matter, the time for consent had gone with Klaus' memories. And Dorian couldn't break his own word, to make the decision by himself. The exhausted body had to give out on its own. "But it's better this way, isn't it? I hope what they say is true, that there's not much left of you inside that skull. I can't bear to think you might be trapped, trying to claw your way out --"

All Dorian had left was this chaste touch on an arm, on shoulder or forehead. A safe kiss on unresponding lips. The day he'd realized Klaus couldn't remember him, all pleasure between them had become vile. The rape of a hapless stranger, not an act of soothing joy between old friends.

Dorian sat for two hours, silent as Klaus, until the other man twitched suddenly and turned to look at him, plainly startled.

_You've forgotten I was here,_ Dorian thought, and left the room when Klaus hitched away his arm in irritation.

 

Part Three

He knew it from her tone of voice, when Inga called him. "Lord Gloria? Something's changed."

A wild hope made Dorian's breath catch, until her words brought him back to reality.

"We brought the new roses in. He didn't react."

Well, Dorian had known it would come to this. Scent was the oldest sense, the first to trigger in humans and the last, normally, to go. With scent and memory inextricably linked, this development was no surprise. "Can you -- can you arrange an experiment for me?"

"Yes, Lord Gloria."

"Take the roses away. Both vases."

On the other end of the line, Inga sounded doubtful. "You remember how he cried, the time they didn't come for a week? Are you certain, Lord Gloria?"

"Take them away. I'll hold."

A long ten minutes later, Inga was back on the telephone. He could tell she was near tears. "He didn't notice. He saw, but it didn't seem to matter."

"Is he still wanting to look out the window?"

"No. He just sits, and stares at nothing."

"I'll be there in --" Dorian checked his desk clock. "In two-and-a-half hours."

#

Klaus sat in his wheelchair. Perhaps the orderlies should have moved him to the bed, but it really didn't matter, did it?

His passing should have come at a more dramatic time of day, some shallow part of Dorian's mind mused. Darkest midnight. A gentle grey twilight, or a triumphant dawn. Not three in the afternoon. It at least could have been more crowded, with family and friends gathered to see a fallen hero off on his final adventure. But the room was quiet. The IV stands were gone. One monitor remained, its quiet beeping following Klaus' heartbeat.

Dorian felt a feverish sense of unreality, as if the last seven years had been a nightmare. That he'd wake up, soon, and find Klaus whole and hale and snuggled beside him in a big, soft bed. Or at least, that they'd both be back at the old ritual of flirtation and furious refusal.

_But this is real, and this is about to end,_ he thought, too worn down to be ashamed by the sheer relief of that knowledge. He knelt beside Klaus, ignoring the twinge of pain from his own knees on the hard floor. His fingers spread over the invalid's forearm, right on the faint pulsepoint. Willing it to stop, begging it silently, because words in this room, just now, were a sacrilege and an insult. _Go,_ he told the body propped up in the chair. _Please, just go. It's all right, my love, I'll forgive you for this eventually, but I just want you out of here, out of this life that should never have been saved._

But that thready pulse lingered on, stubborn as ever. Dorian still felt it under his fingers as he fell asleep.

#

The alien touch on his face woke him, slowly. Alien, because Dorian had allowed no one but Klaus to touch him so these seven years -- and because Klaus had no fingers left to glide over nose and cheekbone and eyelid.

Yet, there it was. A kind, familiar, skittish touch.

Dorian blinked sleepily, noting the angle of sunlight on the fields outside the window. Not much time had passed, in his little nap. His knees and legs were mercifully numb. The hand settled against his jawline. He turned his head to look up at Klaus, whose shallow steady breathing hadn't changed.

Movement flickered at the edge of vision, something darting from his side to the shadows between the wall and the half-open door. "Please leave us -- " Dorian began, thinking it was a nurse or orderly.

A lanky teenager in mud-stained T-shirt and shorts stared down at him, green eyes tracking from him to Klaus. And back, the alert gaze lingering over Dorian's features with hungry wonder. In the reflection of those eyes, Dorian forgot he was an aging queer with thinning curls more straw-white than gold, and a body that he could no longer trust in more-active thievery. He saw tenderness, and silent need, and the same blinding recognition of true love that he'd always blithely spoken about and never really believed -- until Klaus. And this, from a soccer-player a quarter of his age or less, a boy all skinned knees and mud and huge pale eyes like jade lanterns. Dorian could _smell_ the musk of healthy male sweat, damp earth and crushed grass. It didn't arouse him; nothing did, now.

_It's too late to start again, lad,_ he thought bleakly. _I'm no cradle-robber anymore._ "Who are you?" Dorian asked softly in English, not wanting to spook away another witness to the Major's passing.

The black-haired boy shrugged, clutching a grubby soccer ball to his chest. He'd tracked dirt onto the clean floor from his shoes, Dorian noticed, and sported a fresh-but-shallow cut along his left temple. The thief hadn't paid much attention to anybody here but Klaus and the nurses. Surely there had been schoolchildren playing out in the fields, once or twice? The clothing seemed to be some type of team uniform. Perhaps this was a young overachiever, drafted into visiting the elderly and infirm for school credit. Someone else who had attended Klaus' decline, when Dorian wasn't there?

"Are you local?"

All the boy's attention was back on Klaus, his curiosity shading into sudden recognition and horror. He bit his lower lip and his fingers dug into the ball, but if he made any real noise it didn't reach Dorian.

"It's all right, son," Dorian began, "it looks bad, but I don't think he feels much of anything now."

The boy's face set accusingly, and that sidelong stare flickered over Dorian before resting again on the Major.

"I didn't do it to him!" Dorian snarled, standing up with difficulty. "The heroic legendary NATO spybuster wouldn't retire, he wouldn't slow down, he had to go and save the world once too often --"

The boy straightened his spine, a smile twisting his lips as he mouthed the acronym silently: "N – A – T – O." As if that made what had happened to Klaus right, or fair.

"Why the hell are _you_ so proud of him?" Then Dorian looked again, really looked at this idiot child. And thought his heart would stop. Of course he hadn't seen it immediately. He'd first seen the Major full-grown, and the last few years had cast a veil over even that fond memory. The boy was a younger copy of Klaus. Fifteen, sixteen years old, no more. But how? An illegitimate Eberbach wasn't the Major's style at all. Klaus would have married the boy's mother at once, declared this child his heir, and never given Dorian a single chance. The boy's reaction, just now, hinted that this was the first time he'd seen Klaus -- or realized this was his father.

"Who _are_ you?" Dorian asked again.

The boy was crying now, still smiling, silent in that as in everything else. He visibly forced himself to look at the battered figure in the wheelchair, transcending horror to reach a stern acceptance that humbled Dorian. God, the lad was so beautiful in his pride and sadness! He could be nothing but a pure-bred Eberbach, however it had happened. Dorian wanted to hold him, offer what little chaste comfort he could to someone who might as easily have been his own adopted son and heir.

"I'm sorry," whispered the English thief. "Your father was my best friend, and I'll miss him, too."

At that, the boy looked back at Dorian. His next smile was even more familiar, an ironic quirk softening into pity. Dorian held his ground, watching the earlier adoration give way to a hard-eyed assessment. The boy was memorizing Dorian's face. Judging him.

No, the thief guessed with his own age-honed perceptions. _He's choosing something, between me and -- oh, God, no!_

A last regretful look, taking in all of Dorian, everything that Dorian implied and offered. Then the boy turned away from him, limping a little as he stalked toward the wheelchair. Klaus' ruined vacant face still stared out the window. The Major didn't even twitch as one graceful, mud-streaked hand touched his forehead and brushed shut his single eyelid.

#

The steady whine of the monitor woke Dorian, even before Inga had reached the room. She found him still kneeling, dazed and staring at the floor. He didn't blink, even when the shrilling machine went quiet at the touch of a button.

"Your Lordship?" she asked, patting his arm. "Dorian? He's -- he's gone. You said 'no doctors.' I have to record it."

Dorian focused on the wall-clock. "It's ten past four. Tea-time. But there's no mud on the floor."

"Of course not," she humored him, coaxing his slender body up from the floor. "I cleaned it this morning, and there's no mud on our shoes."

"The bastard knew all along." Dorian felt disbelief give way to fury, swiftly progressing along the stages of grief that he thought he'd already survived. Unfair, to endure them all again. "He knew!"

"Knew what?" Inga was strong. Without his realizing it, she'd hauled Dorian to the nurses' station, where someone else folded his icy hands around a warm plastic cup. If it was tea he drank, Dorian couldn't taste it.

"He knew what it would come to, before he even went to University. That it was a choice between NATO and me. The way he would suffer. And he still chose NATO."

"Heroes do that," said Inga, her voice drifting a little. Dorian realized there had been a sedative in the liquid. He didn't fight it.

The ordeal was over. He'd wake up in the morning, on a cot in a waiting room, and return to his loyal thieves and would-be admirers. He could stop feeling guilty -- wasn't that what Klaus had been trying to tell him, all along? That even true love -- and it had been, Dorian knew that now! -- couldn't match duty. Nearly three decades in the chase, a single night of wholly-fulfilled passion, and seven years of hopeless vigil. In the morning, Dorian might sort out whether it had been worth it.

At the moment, he was very tired.

#

Epilogue

When he woke up, his world had changed forever.

"Eberbach? Eberbach, hey -- you in there?" The words snapped him back to a soccer field in Bonn. The coach waved a pudgy hand in front of his eyes. "Can you focus? Does your head hurt? How many fingers am I holding up? What year is it?"

Klaus squinted up from his comfortable prone spot in the mud and shredded grass. "Yes. Yes. Two. And --" he thought for a second, "Nineteen sixty-eight. May I go kill Steinmann now?"

The coach laughed and helped him stand. Steinmann shuffled nervously nearby, his quicksilver energy grounded during the time-out. For the first time in several years, Klaus met the other player's eyes without annoyance or secret shame. _I don't have time for your games,_ Klaus thought regretfully to himself, but he knew Jan would sense something of the farewell.

_You're not going to trip me, and we're not going to the World Cup together, Jan. I'm going to be a great hero in NATO, a respected military leader. I'm going to have a long and adventurous life. And I really am going to meet the most beautiful, fascinating, and loyal man in the world!_


End file.
